Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/623

Rh a group of individual men who do not know how to organize their strength, and a strictly-disciplined, well-ordered army suitably-formed and well armed, and which, by the strict subordination of the many wills to the central authority, is always equal to the highest achievements.

It is true that these scientific researches into biology have left as yet the most important questions unsolved. It is not yet possible to regard all life-processes as simple modifications of the other forces of Nature and to ascertain their mechanical equivalents; we cannot yet convert absolute heat or light into life; and, although chemistry is daily doing more and more to bridge over the gaping chasm which once separated the organic and inorganic systems, it has not yet succeeded in finding out the precise matter which exclusively supports the life-process, on which alone the cells subsist. Thus, then, the beginning of life is still wrapped in obscurity.

After referring in this connection to the transmission of epidemics among plants, animals, and man, and to the microscopical labors of Leeuwenhoek, Ehrenberg, Gagniard-Latour, Schwann, and Kützing, Prof. Cohn goes on to say that the investigators of the present time, to whom Pasteur has given a powerful impulse, have been the first to establish beyond doubt that without Bacteria no putrefaction, and without yeast-fungi no fermentation takes place; that this decomposition is accomplished only through the sustenance and living activity of those microscopic cells.

Many a mystery of life will doubtless be unfolded to us if our opticians during the next twenty-five years should manage to raise the power of the microscope in the same proportion as in the previous quarter of a century, in which it has been at least quadrupled. The best microscope of Schick and Plossl in 1846 did not magnify more than 500 diameters; the "immersion-lens xv." of Hartnack over 2,000 diameters. Still Dr. Cohn does not venture to hope that during the next twenty-five years all the questions of science which are at present being agitated will be solved. As one veil after another is lifted, we find ourselves behind a still thicker one, which conceals from our longing eyes the mysterious goddess of whom we are in search.

Dr. Cohn, in concluding his eloquent address, attempts to point out the characteristics which distinguish the present from the past generation. In the former epoch, students confined their researches to single and carefully marked-off divisions of Nature, without any regard to the neighboring and closely-allied regions, which must necessarily lead to the one-sided view that these divisions belong to Nature herself. In the present generation, on the other hand, the several physical sciences have entered into the closest organic union. Physics and chemistry, along with mathematical astronomy and geology, have been blended into a new science—the history of the development of worlds; palæontology, systematic botany, and zoology, have been joined into a